If you missed the news, Null and Nakazawa Tech recently teamed up with speedrun.com to throw our first-ever speedrunning competition for Athena Crisis, with $1,000 in prizes. “But Rorie, that’s a turn-based strategy game,” you might say, to which I would respond “Yes!” Turn-based strategy games can be speedran as well as anything else, as it turns out, and the team of players that assembled their skills in the Speedrunning channel of the Athena Crisis Discord certainly did their best to get through a curated selection of maps in the lowest amount of time possible.
It was extremely interesting to see how the runs evolved over the 10 days of the contest. With our original set of maps it was clear that an entire run would be completed within five or six minutes, so to extend the challenge a bit, we added two custom maps at the end of the run to throw a bit of a monkey wrench into the event. The runners quickly dove in and Ronwin posted a time of just over 27 minutes the day after the challenge begun, and steady progress was made from there. Storied made a few leaps in the days afterward, setting three new records over the course of four days of strategizing.
A look at a speedrun attempt by dxdydzd
The strats improved with each submitted run, with Grondious eventually coming in with a sub 12 minute time on May 31. Not to be outdone, Storied improved on Grondious’ time by four seconds on the final day of the contest! Unfortunately for Storied, Grondious took note and eventually posted the winning time of 11 minutes and ten seconds, less than half the time the first run took.
Congratulations to Grondious on their first place finish and the $500 prize! Storied’s good work resulted in a second place finish and $300, while outlyer wound up in third place which will earn them a $200 prize.
We really enjoyed seeing all the runs over the course of the contest. Thanks to everyone who participated or chatted about the runs in the official Discord; if you’re curious about more Athena Crisis speedrunning challenges, the full prequel campaign is actively being run, with the #1 time being set last week by SeregaPlay. Join the Discord, make sure your mouse clicks quick, and maybe we’ll see you on the leaderboards sometime soon.
